


Smaug

by Surefall



Series: Wade Has Faith (In the Fourth Wall) [2]
Category: Cable and Deadpool, Deadpool (Comics), Deadpool - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Island of Providence, M/M, Memory Loss, Nate Has No Idea, Providence (Marvel), foresight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 07:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13875891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Surefall/pseuds/Surefall
Summary: Wade disposed of nine bodies without their help.





	Smaug

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place between _Like a Sieve_ and _#weather vane_.

~Wade loses time~ 

Something is burning. 

Wade is already gliding through the hallway between their apartments, a shadow among shadows. There's no smoke, no glow of creeping flames. He's already wearing his suit and stealth harness. He knows because he can feel the subtle difference of their weight, the light touch of soft, braided leather, the way his katanas are laid along either side of his spine like folded wings. Not alone, then, if Vera and Wang are with him, as classy as ever in carbon blacked steel. Everything is properly accounted for even if he can't remember getting dressed or kitted out. 

Ash swirls in his vision, but there is no ash against the red of his suit.

Hallucination? 

Except Wade doesn't normally dream of fire and he can feel the pressure, like the heat and stifling stillness before a summer storm. 

This is more than his mind playing tricks on him.

Wade slips into Nate's room, the door shutting soundlessly behind him. His friend is sleeping peacefully, completely untroubled by the fires that swirl through the noise of Wade's mind. He pulls his mask off to better catch the scent of smoke and folds down beside the bed, fitting himself into the soft curve between Nate's head and his stupidly over muscled shoulder. Slow deep breaths to fill his lungs, inhaling Nate softly, carefully. Warmth. Sandalwood. Sweat. Metal. Scents that drop like gentle stones into the smooth, still waters that Wade has become. There is nothing of smoke or fire, of fear or death. The thing that Wade is hunting -- for now he realizes he _is_ hunting -- isn't hunting Nate. 

The part of Wade that worries for Nate -- who is so much more soft and fragile and breakable than Providence -- settles and smooths as he lingers, indulging in counting the steady tick-tock of Nate's pulse beneath his lips, which is slow and sweet in sleep. Nate needs his sleep. He doesn't get nearly enough of it, and unlike Wade, he really needs it. Wade licks gently over the pulse in a silent, damp caress, tasting sweat and soft paper, before he reluctantly pulls away, rising to his feet again as he pulls his mask back down. A gentle tug rearranges the blanket to more properly cover Nate and then Wade is slipping out Nate's window, easing the latch shut as he balances on the ledge outside.

Outside, clouds cover the moon, painting the silver of Providence in shadows. Wade can feel the heat in the shifting of the wind, teasing at his senses. There are no clues at Nate's window. This is only the starting point, but Wade can feel that it's the starting point for a reason. The ground is far below and there's no good way to get there without shattering, so along the roof line it must be.

Wade knows all the hand holds there are to know, so it's a work of moments to scale the wall to the roof, but which path is the right path?

Wade paces a careful circle on the roof, inspecting the sky line, but the lines of sight are as familiar as the back of Wade's gloved hand, uninterrupted by the shadows of intruders or the insect punctures of assault craft. Everything is peaceful ... but Wade is still tasting ashes. 

Up here, Wade can smell the wind coming from the ocean, as crisp and salty as Nate's skin, clearing his thoughts even as a it bounces a pebble across the rooftop. Tick-tock. The thrush knocks.

_Stand by the gray stone when the thrush knocks and the last light will shine upon the key-hole ..._

Wade looks up to the sky line as the moon breaks through the clouds, shining down upon the spires that mark the twin forges of Providence. The furnaces gleam in the moonlight. A pale light upon the key-hole.

With the goal in sight, Wade focuses on speed. It's a running jump from this rooftop to the next and after that he lets his mind unravel as

~the body remembers what the mind forgets~

Wade has been over every inch of Providence a hundred times, a thousand times. Every day and every night, Wade has quartered every level, scaled every wall, dove from every roof. The memory of his body is infinitely more reliable the memory of his mind. Wade has ingrained Providence into the only memory he can rely on. If he were to be made to forget

~he always knows what he needs to know. other times, at their convenience, they need him to forget.~ 

he would still be able to traverse Providence. Wade could do it in his sleep. Wade can do a lot of things in his sleep.

Wade catches a lighting rod, takes the curve and vaults smoothly onto the roof of the waste water treatment plant. From there, he's dropping to race across the top of the narrow wall that separates this building from the furnace control room. Speed and momentum are his allies now. The furnaces are too close together for his liking and pierced with too many maintenance supports. He leaps, springing from furnace tower to furnace tower, bouncing off their warmed skins, bleeding momentum, but not enough to stop him from reaching the top. He grabs hold of the furnace rim and hauls himself onto the lip, looking down into the darkness.

The smell of fire wafts from the furnace mouth. There is the clean smell of the furnace itself, its molten heart causing a warm updraft that washes over Wade and warms him in his suit ... and then there is the soft smell of a charnel house, the merest trace of poison and despair. Rats have been sneaking into his den, leaving their refuse behind, revealing themselves to him. 

Most people don't realize how quiet Wade can be, how he can cloak himself in silence and shadow. It's the red in the suit and the non-stop talking, the way he likes to stomp his boots and make his weapons jingle, how he likes explosions and gunfire and has never been long on any sort of patience ... so people forget that the red is to cloak the bloodstains, that Wade is never without swords and knives, that he moves an armory without making a single sound, and he can wait forever, unblinking and unsleeping, until his target moves through the path of his scope.

Wade takes a moment to shift and flex, testing that the harness sits silent and proper, like perfectly settled feathers, before he dives down into the dark. He bleeds momentum by bouncing off the walls and then he's folding against the ground, boneless, a shadow among shadows. It is quiet and still and hot, but he smells smoke and ash, curling through the air like a column of incense in the dark. Wisps of smoke curling in the air, white against the darkness. 

A touch against his temple activates his starlight lenses and then he can see them as well as smell and sense them. On the precipice, his mind falls silent as the voices fall away. The static fades.

~the body remembers what the mind forgets~ 

Sometimes, memory only gets in the way. His mind is clear and still. The clouds obscure the sky, casting their shadows across the crystal clarity of his thoughts ... but Wade doesn't need his memory to kill. It's tattooed across his skin, humming in his blood, imprinted upon his bones.

There are twelve silent steps to lay the first man down, a knife cutting across his throat in the dark. He claws at his throat, a desperate wheeze too faint to hear and Wade lays his body silently on ground. The second man is six steps more and he turns his head as if he feels the motion of the air. Wade's thrown blade goes right through his eye.

He would have laid this one down gently too, but the smoke curls and Wade steps to the side as gun fire lights the darkness and bullets tear through where he once stood. The time for silence has passed, but his mind is still cold and clear. Wade draws his katanas as he dives beneath the arcing fire and comes up to slice the third man in two.

Copper and ash whirl in the air. Wade runs, rebounding off the wall to redirect momentum, and cuts the head off the fourth man. A kick sends the body into the fifth man and Wade isn't far behind, cutting across the throat of the fifth in passing as he carries forward to skewer the sixth. 

Smoke fades as it wavers in the wind. Wade doesn't give them time to react as he flashes forward, one katana thrown to stagger the seventh man as he scoops up the gun of the sixth man and puts a spray of bullets into the heads of the eighth and ninth. He strides forward to collect his blade and double taps the seventh man to finish him. 

Wade could have asked them who sent them, but he knows they wouldn't answer. He already knows, anyway, hears the rat-a-tat of thrushes in the dark, shattering their snails against a dragon's hide.

Nine arrows. Broken.

The smoke is fading. The ash whirls away, leaving the night clear. 

Wade no longer smells Providence burning.

* * *

The ceramic sheath of the furnace is nearly hot enough to burn the skin from his hands. Wade can smell her burning, sloughing off their poisons like a dragon shedding troublesome scales, impervious to the blades of insects. There is a weakness close to her heart, as narrow a chink in her armor as old Smaug. The thrushes must have seen it and whispered traitorous words into the ears of their enemies. Enemies who have shot their arrows, old and poisonous and black, across the ocean to pierce her ... but this dragon is not defenseless, she does not sleep alone and unprotected. Wade has cut the arrows from the sky, he has shattered the barbed points that would have pierced her and left their useless fragments to be consumed in her fire. 

All that remains is to engrave memory like lamp posts, to leave trail signs to mark his way. For the days the clouds cast shadows across his mind, shadows black as pitch, deep enough to drown in --

~he always knows what he needs to know. other times, at their convenience, they need him to forget.~ 

\-- and revive soaked in blood, the sunlight bright upon his blood trail. 

Wade punches the holes gently into her skin. Deep enough to remember, shallow enough to protect her. The pattern stipples itself, woven into the natural curve of her shell, stepping stones straddling the line between warm sunlight and chill shadow. He brushes his hand across her flank, scattering the shavings from his work. 

He has no particular love of Gray, but the crayon feels smooth and clean between his fingers and smells like moonlight. It's nearly invisible against the silver of her skin, a mere difference in reflection as he colors in the shape of the crescent moon and makes sure that its tips are dagger sharp. Black is one of his favorites, heavy and dark and worn to a nub from all the eyes he's drawn with it. Arrows take shape, slashing like rain, squared off fletches lifted to the sky, nine in all to dance beneath the sharp gray moon. Brick Red is for furnaces, for bricks and houses that should be safe and sound, so red shall brick in x's, broad and fat, one for every body now burning in the fire heart of his dragon. They lay beneath the arrows, on their sides, because they've all fallen down. 

When Wade finds the bow that shot them, he'll break it across his thighs.

Not today, not tomorrow ... but someday, one day. 

Nate's not always watching and Wade never sleeps unless he wants to.

**Author's Note:**

>  _The Hobbit_ references are all pretty obvious. Starlight lenses are from the Batman comics of the '90s.
> 
> This story is brought to you by "I See Fire" by Ed Sheeran and "The Misty Mountains Cold" from The Hobbit soundtrack. These are the soundtrack of this fic. :D


End file.
